The World’s First Trial for a Lung Cancer Vaccine

Scientists in the UK have begun preparations for the world’s first clinical trial for a lung cancer vaccine – the LungVax. The Phase 1 trial will be conducted by the University of Oxford and University College London, and will begin in Summer 2026. The researchers were awarded £2.06 million ($2.8 million USD) from Cancer Research UK, supported by the CRIS Cancer Foundation, to run the trial over the next four years. Currently, the study has been planned to take on 40 participants.

The study will evaluate if LungVax is safe and effective at preventing cancer in those at high risk of lung cancer – specifically, recurring or new cases of non-small cell lung cancer. With the average 5-year survival rate for lung cancer at around 32%, successfully developing a preventative lung cancer vaccine will be an important step in improving survival rates for the disease.

The LungVax vaccine carries instructions that train the body’s immune system to recognize cancer mutations on the surface of lung cells. Once identified, this will trigger the body to produce a strong defensive T cell response to kill the cancer cells.

The vaccine will use a harmless virus to deliver these defensive instructions – in this case, with ChAdOx2, a virus that can no longer replicate. The virus cannot multiply in the body, or cause disease. A similar technology was used in the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which was estimated to have saved six million lives during 2021 alone. Since then, this technology has also been used in trials for multiple preventative vaccines, including those for the Nipah virus, Marburg virus (similar to the Ebola virus) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

The University of Oxford has also started research on using an AI supercomputer, Dawn, to help cancer vaccine research. With new computing power, the supercomputer can process huge data sets to quickly identify hidden patterns, scaling up research to design new cancer vaccines.

Research in this area will also build up the Oxford Neoantigen Atlas, an open-source online platform that maps cancer markers and mutations to support cancer vaccine research.